While the big news in comics has been the return of the Marvel and DC crossovers, Dynamite is also getting into the team-up game with some of their own crossover specials. But unlike the Deadpool/Batman (and vice versa) comics, Dynamite and DC are teaming up to give us a miniseries starring everyone’s favorite Mistress of The Dark, Elvira, and Harley Quinn. Featuring the legendary team of Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Connor, Harley Quinn x Elvira is perfectly timed for the Halloween season, and the two characters make for an extremely fun combination.
Harley is troubled by her dreams. She feels like she’s missing something in her life, yet can’t put a finger on it. When she meets up with her pal Big Tony, he tries to help her piece together what she could be missing. After a back and forth, she decides that it has to be that she missed out on her big annual Halloween party the year before due to a bout with the flu. To make up for it, she’s going to throw a new Halloween bash (in August) and get Elvira to host it. Conveniently for Harley, Elvira just found out that her show is getting cancelled, and she needs to move out of the cushy penthouse apartment that the studio supplied to her. With no job prospects and nowhere to live, will Elvira take Harley’s offer and host the biggest Halloween bash the world has ever seen?
Well, obviously yeah, or else we wouldn’t have a comic. One of the best things that Harley Quinn x Elvira does is have Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Connor script it, as they fit the tone of both characters perfectly. That’s not a huge surprise when it comes to Harley, as the duo arguably helped launch her popularity into the stratosphere with their New 52 run on the character. But what surprised me was how well they fit the tone of Elvira. As someone who loves watching Elvira clips, especially during spooky season, I was pleasantly surprised at how well their dialogue sounded like something Cassandra Peterson would say. The premise for this team-up is just absurd enough to work for both characters, and they play off one another in hilarious ways.
DC/Dynamite
Palmiotti and Connor’s script is really focused in on their run on the character, which is to be expected, but I do think it may lead to some confusion for anyone who either hasn’t read that run or has forgotten some of the side characters. The decision to focus on supporting characters like Big Tony, Red Tool, and others from their run did cause me to take some time to recalibrate my reading to think back on what that era of Harley was like. Thankfully they are not the focal point here, so it’s not too much of a drag on the book.
Not only does Amanda Connor script Harley Quinn x Elvira #1, she also draws it too! Well, a few pages of it. Connor primarily handles the first three pages of the book and a hilarious one page flash back, but luckily Juan Samu’s art on the rest of the book is so close in style to Connor’s that I didn’t really notice the difference at all. Both artists’ styles match the story perfectly, while Samu is also good at making their version of Elvira look like a mix of her real-life counterpart while also fitting the heightened setting of Harley’s world. It can be hard to pull the fourth wall breaking look to the reader, but Samu and Connor both pull it off really well.
While Harley Quinn x Elvira may throw off fans of Harley’s current run, there’s still a lot of spooky Halloween fun to be had within its pages. As a fan of both characters, I was really happy with the end result here, and the promise of more story between these two slightly mismatched pals looks to make for one of the more unique and entertaining inter-company crossovers that we’ve had in some time.
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